My boys wanted to be Link for Halloween, so I decided to make them Windwaker Link costumes since that cartoony version is a lot simpler than the more realistic Link. heh! (I also made three costumes since I knew Glowbug would want one when she saw her brothers being matching.)

I didn’t want to make separate vests and tunics because Halloween here is really hot. The shirts are Deep Sea V Necks with the vee deepened and a panel of lighter green sewn behind. Also, I used the same lighter green for the sleeves.

I think Link wears white pants, but that wasn’t going to happen for my kids. Their shorts are all light grey Coastal Craze Baggies.

For their shields, I googled to find a clear picture, which turned out to be the nendoroid toy. Then for each shield, I did this:

cut out 2 shield-shaped pieces of Soft & Stable

basted solid-colored quilting cotton to one side of each piece of Soft & Stable

painted the shield design on one shield piece (using just cheapie acrylic paint)

made two kid’s-wrist-sized fleece loops and sewed them to the other shield piece

basted the two shield pieces WST

bound the raw edges using 2″ wide white bias strips

pressed the bias strips to make double fold bias tape

sewed the bias tape to the front of the shield along the bias tape’s fold line

folded the bias tape over to the back and pinned in place

stitched in the ditch from the front and caught the back edge

I used an instructables tutorial to make the hats. I also added some decorative “stitching” along the seam because I saw it on hats for sale on Etsy and thought it looked cute. :} For the stitching, I cut slits in the hat and threaded brown fleece strips through in x shapes. (In the picture, the left hat is inside-out to show what the underside of the decorative stitching looks like.)

Sunshine wanted to be Yoshi for Halloween, which I was excited about because there are already a lot of costumes to “be inspired by” (copy). 😀

Just like with Cosmo’s hydreigon costume, I made the basic hat with the template I made following Stitched by Crystal’s dino hat tutorial — it was even the same template as Cosmo’s because their heads are practically the same size. Yoshi’s features are all stuffed circles or ovals, and I guesstimated the sizes to make them by making round shapes with my fingers and holding them over the hat. heh! (oops, I took pictures on two separate days, and the lighting was obviously quite different.)

The shell is made of a large white circle that I gathered and stuffed around the edges to form the shell ring, and then a red circle (I can’t remember if it was larger or smaller or the same size as the white circle, oops!) that I gathered into a sphere, stuffed as a ball, and then squooshed down to stitch onto the white part to form the poofy shell.

Yoshi’s clothes are the Oliver + S field trip raglan shirt and Peekaboo Pattern’s Coastal Craze Baggies; I like that he can just wear these normally after Halloween! Husbo especially requested the brown boots so we bought them just for this costume; he also wanted to get long green socks, but those were surprisingly hard for us to find (so we didn’t hahaha)!

Sunshine kept asking for Yoshi’s egg (and tongue and tail! — but I refused those), so at first I was planning to make him a trick-or-treat bag in the shape of and decorated like a Yoshi egg, but that was stressing me out too much so I just made a regular stuffed Yoshi egg. I was super lazy and bought PlanetPlush’s Yoshi egg pattern, which makes a perfectly nice, throwable egg. (The kids have been having a lot of fun playing catch with it.) I don’t have an embroidery machine, though, so I had to figure out my own green dots. :D:D

I’m super thrilled with this costume, mostly because Sunshine loves it and wore each piece constantly as soon as I finished them!

I didn’t ask Glowbug what she wanted to be for Halloween because I didn’t think she’d have an idea (though now that I think of it, she probably would have said Dora, oops!), so I tried making her a costume that was twirly but not princessy: Rainbow Brite! I also found old episodes for her to watch on youtube so she’d (hopefully) get excited about it… and now Sunshine asks to watch Rainbow Brite. hah!

I used Hey June Handmade’s Edelweiss dress pattern with just a few modifications. I wanted Glowbug’s costume to have a slightly higher neck, so I cut straight across the highest point of the bodice (the pattern scoops down a little). The sleeves are half circles with cotton batting inside, and they’re holding up nicely at least for this Halloween! I think they might droop a little after the dress goes through the wash. Finally, I took up the skirt an inch, in addition to making the hem deeper.

The button closure for the back is nice for adjusting the fit. I made the 3Y size and it was a bit too wide, but it was easy to have Glowbug try it on first and then sew the buttons further over than it was marked on the pattern. I sewed the buttons on a little crooked, but I was too lazy to fix them because I’d already sewn them on twice. 😀

Cosmo told us that he wanted to be a hydreigon for Halloween, which I thought was crazypants at first (too hard!), but then google and awesome cosplayers came to my rescue. Yay! Here’s Cosmo’s you-have-two-siblings-so-nothing-is-going-to-be-super-complicated hydreigon costume:

I used Stitched by Crystal’s dino hat tutorial to make the basic fleece hat, then attached fleece shapes for the nose, teeth, and frill thingy, and then used felt for the eyes. The frill thingy has Soft & Stable sandwiched inside to keep it upright.

I didn’t do anything fancy to attach the frill — I just stitched it onto the back (kind of wonkily). While I was working on this hat, I found out that one of our kiddie-sized basketballs was the perfect size to act as a hatstand!

I worked on his gloves last — they’re extra heads; see ’em? I used 30 Minute Craft’s hand puppet tutorial for the basic idea, then added an extra layer for the mini frills. They’re not as fancy as fireflytwinkletoes’s mittens, but Cosmo’s been having fun with them!

Mike’s thinking about making cardboard wings for Cosmo, but my part is done! …except for the pokemon ball trick-or-treat bag. >_<

I love how fantastic sewing is for someone like me who has hobby ADD — bored of making quilts? Sew clothes! Bored of making clothes? Sew bags! Tired of making bags? Sew toys! And so I made some monsters for my kiddies.

I let them choose which one they wanted (Glowbug got the leftover one), and Cosmo picked the pink monster that’s based on Igor Mousenstein.

Sunshine chose the one from Make a Monster. I was so surprised that he actually really likes it — it’s been a couple of weeks, and he’s still carrying it around! He calls it his dolly. 😀

Glowbug got the last one, which I made just so Sunshine would still be able to make a choice after Cosmo. It’s based on a monster I saw on Pinterest, but the link goes somewhere weird… anyway, I think it’s really funny! It’s the perfect shape to put a crinkly thing inside for babies, although that didn’t occur to me when I made this one.

Last month, I won a copy of Quilting Arts Gifts 2013 from Esch House Quilts, and when I got it, Cosmo flipped through it with me. We both liked the trick-or-treat bag project, and I managed to make a couple in time for Halloween.

Mr. Yazoo helped by drawing the faces for the bags — he made a meanie face for Sunshine cause he’s been having a little bit of his terrible twos.

I found some cute Halloween fabric that I’d hoarded from last year to use for the bag lining, and I substituted automotive headliner fabric for the batting, or whatever it was the project called for. Oh, and I have an opinion about automotive headliner fabric, if you care. 😀

I’ve used both Soft and Stable and automotive headliner fabric, which I bought specifically because I read people on the interwebs saying that it could be used as a substitute for (the expensive and unavailable-locally-for-me) Soft and Stable. I think headliner fabric is fine for small, semi-disposable things, like kiddie treat bags, where you do want it to stand up by itself, but you don’t necessarily want to use your good supplies. However, it isn’t a good substitute for nice bags (like, say, a weekender) because it’s nowhere near as sturdy as Soft and Stable — it’s much, much thinner and kind of fragile. On the third hand, it is a good substitute for grown-up bags IF all you want to do is take a picture and show off your pretty-bag-that-you-couldn’t-get-Soft-and-Stable-for-but-still-want-the-look-of-it. 😉 That’s my opinion!

Anyway, back to the halloweenie bags, Mr. Yazoo draw a happy face for Cosmo since he’s been a sweetie lately. heh.

It’s quilted in a diamondish fashion, and I did manage to finish it in time for Cosmo to use it at school. I was kind of too lazy to put a label on it, but since Cosmo’s stuff is supposed to have his name on it so they don’t get mixed up with other kids’ stuff, I sewed in some twill tape with his name stamped on.

When I gave it to Cosmo, he flipped it over and told me the robot flannel side is the front, cause that’s the side he likes. I think the robots are cool, too, but WAH. This is what I get for not having appreciated all the stuff my mom sewed for me when I was a kid! Karmaaaaaaaaa!

If you don’t already follow her, LiEr at ikatbag is such an awesome sewerer — she makes clever, thrifty, and just plain fantastic stuff. Earlier in the year, I found out about her hilarious chicken pattern, and I super duper wanted to make it; fortunately, Cosmo’s birthday was right about that time. So I got to make the funniest chicken ever!

Doesn’t look funny to you? Wait for it…

It lays eggs! Bwahahaha! There’s a channel going from the top of the chicken near the tail to the place where eggs usually come out. hee hee hee!

You just have to scrounge around the house for leftover plastic eggs, load up the little chickies, and then squeeze them out! ikatbag’s pattern post has great pictures of the egg-laying process — I was too chicken to take my own (hurk hurk).

This was such a fun present to give to Cosmo. He kept asking us to make the chicken lay eggs, and I loved seeing him carry the chicken around under his arm. It’s big!

He also really liked the baby chickies. Nowadays, he sometimes takes a chick to school to have for naptime. LiEr really made a fantastic pattern — the chicken is high-larious and the chickies are adorable! And a big plus is that if you sew fast and wonky (like me), that just gives the baby chicks even more personality. 😀

Cosmo wanted a pillow for naptime at preschool, so I bought a super cheap, junky, standard pillow from K-Mart, pulled out the stuffing, cut it in half, and then sewed it into a new muslin case so it would (hopefully) fit in his cubby hole. Then I used Sew Hooked’s tutorial to make a quick pillowcase. I think it makes a nice one!

Then I had half a pillow’s worth of stuffing sitting around, so I used it to make another small pillow to add to Caleb’s birthday present. (This one looks floppier because I tried to make the case big enough to fit a standard pillow, in case he ever wanted to get rid of the halfapillow.)

In unrelated news, I think I’ve landed on a new feed reader! I’d been using Feedly, but recently realized that it doesn’t allow you to search within your feeds, which I love being able to do since I have a terrible memory. After poking around for a bit, I found out that Feedly used to have that feature, then removed it, and is probably planning to put it back in as a feature of paid accounts. Harrumph!

I tried looking for another browser-based reader that lets you search through your feeds, but couldn’t find one. So tonight, instead of sewing, I tried installing Tiny Tiny RSS using Lifehacker’s guide, and I like it! It definitely lets you search your feeds, although now that I think about it, it can only search the blog posts that are still saved in your database. Still, that’s better than nothing! And it’s kind of fun keeping control of your own subscriptions.

I’m still here! I’m still sewing, too, but I’ve been playing video games instead of goofing off online. :} Anyhoo, I made two kiddie backpacks recently-ish. One was for Cosmo because his preschool said he needed one for field trips, and the other was for a present.

I made both of these by generally following the Owl Tag Along backpack pattern at the Moda Bakeshop. I left off the side and interior pockets, added an exterior zippered pocket, and did the adjustable straps differently. For the car backpack, I used the back pattern pieces, which makes the backpack sit higher up. I guess that’s so your toddler won’t tip over, and it kind of looks okay on Sunshine, who’s two…

… but it looks weird on Cosmo, who’s four. Oh, but a four-year-old isn’t a toddler, is he? And I just noticed that I could have loosened the straps for him. User error all over the place!

On the pac-man backpack, I used the front pattern piece to cut the back, and I sewed the straps into the top seam like normal backpacks. I think that looks a lot better!

I had these grand plans to embroider Caleb’s name on in the style of this google game picture, but then I got lazy and just freezer-paper-stenciled his name on the pocket using a pac-man-like font. I like the way the tutorial tells you to put in the lining — it’s not awful on the inside, the double lines of stitching on the outside look pretty nice, and there’s no hand-sewing!

I’m often kind of mean about using really cute fabric for linings, but I’d hoarded my whale fabric for so long that it had gotten faded along the parts that were exposed to the window, so I didn’t mind using it all up. O_o

I didn’t put on piping since I didn’t have any (plus, I feel like making piping uses up a ton of fabric!), so the backpacks don’t hold their shapes as well as they could. I did put stabilizer behind everything except the zipper pieces so the backpacks wouldn’t completely collapse. I think it works well enough, especially since field trip chaperones end up holding the kids’ backpacks, anyway!